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Based on what?

You're not the first to ask.

"Without open source, Apple will find itself in the same position as today's Microsoft in seven years."

I bet Steve Jobs wishes he were in the same position as a company that has a 90% desktop market share and sold 18 million smartphones in a year, an increase of 42.9% oevr the previous year.

Wouldn't that be similar to this? http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/1/25/6747

Well, yes in a certain very distorted sense of the word there is more evidence coming out that carrying a cell phone isn't very healthy, I mean as time passes we do see more studies claiming connections between negative health outcomes and cell phone use. However, we also see more studies disputing this link.

Could cell phones be somewhat unhealthy? Sure, but there are some careful studies suggesting the opposite and most importantly any theoretical basis for the supposed effect is at best pretty speculative.

First of all ask yourself if you were a cell phone company would it make sense to go out and suppress the science with some organized cover up? For starters given that lots of smart people who have read the research aren't convinced it's likely that your biases as a cell phone exec would virtually guarantee that you didn't believe the health claims. But in that case you would want to fund the most reputable scientists and perform the most respectable study possible rather than funding less influential rent-a-studies. Even if these execs have been convinced of the link by a unpublished stream of compelling evidence the lawsuit against the tobacco companies should have taught them that you shouldn't cover up the science and risk liability when you can just use advertising to associate your product with healthy living in the mind of the public despite the science.

I mean let's be serious, the idea that the cell phone companies are engaged in some intentional plan to cover up the evidence about cell phone harm just isn't plausible. But while it isn't as sexy we know that publication bias exists and can have a substantial effect. Scientists want to spend their time on papers that will bring recognition, grants and employment not ones that say "we didn't find any statistically significant correlation in the groups we examined." This means we are a lot more likely to hear about data sets showing a link than those that don't. After all 5% of studies should end up with an effect at a 95% significance.

Moreover, it's hugely difficult to run a randomized trial for this kind of claim meaning that any effect could be nothing more than an unrecognized prior cause. People who use cell phones are far more likely to use a wide range of other products and probably correlates with a ton of genetic and socio-economic factors. Even studies linking which ear people used for their phone to later cancer occurrence aren't definitive. It's certainly plausible that our dominant hemisphere is more active/different and thus runs a greater risk of cancer.

The truth is that these sort of weak statistical links between an item an ill health effects are frequently wrong and need to be examined carefully. If, as we see in the cell phone study, not only do the studies go both ways but the more careful positive studies show a weaker effect and we lack any firm theoretical foundation for expecting an effect we should conclude it's probably just an artifact of publication bias or common causation.

Of course given that people are so conviced radiation is evil that they falsely convince themselves it makes them sick I don't expect this kind of reasoned consideration to have much impact on the public at large. However, if you are that afraid of "radiation" you should find another website.

Well, yes in a certain very distorted sense of the word there is more evidence coming out that carrying a cell phone isn't very healthy, I mean as time passes we do see more studies claiming connections between negative health outcomes and cell phone use. However, we also see more studies disputing this link.

Could cell phones be somewhat unhealthy? Sure, but there are some careful studies suggesting the opposite and most importantly any theoretical basis for the supposed effect is at best pretty speculative.

First of all ask yourself if you were a cell phone company would it make sense to go out and suppress the science with some organized cover up? For starters given that lots of smart people who have read the research aren't convinced it's likely that your biases as a cell phone exec would virtually guarantee that you didn't believe the health claims. But in that case you would want to fund the most reputable scientists and perform the most respectable study possible rather than funding less influential rent-a-studies. Even if these execs have been convinced of the link by a unpublished stream of compelling evidence the lawsuit against the tobacco companies should have taught them that you shouldn't cover up the science and risk liability when you can just use advertising to associate your product with healthy living in the mind of the public despite the science.

I mean let's be serious, the idea that the cell phone companies are engaged in some intentional plan to cover up the evidence about cell phone harm just isn't plausible. But while it isn't as sexy we know that publication bias exists and can have a substantial effect. Scientists want to spend their time on papers that will bring recognition, grants and employment not ones that say "we didn't find any statistically significant correlation in the groups we examined." This means we are a lot more likely to hear about data sets showing a link than those that don't. After all 5% of studies should end up with an effect at a 95% significance.

Moreover, it's hugely difficult to run a randomized trial for this kind of claim meaning that any effect could be nothing more than an unrecognized prior cause. People who use cell phones are far more likely to use a wide range of other products and probably correlates with a ton of genetic and socio-economic factors. Even studies linking which ear people used for their phone to later cancer occurrence aren't definitive. It's certainly plausible that our dominant hemisphere is more active/different and thus runs a greater risk of cancer.

The truth is that these sort of weak statistical links between an item an ill health effects are frequently wrong and need to be examined carefully. If, as we see in the cell phone study, not only do the studies go both ways but the more careful positive studies show a weaker effect and we lack any firm theoretical foundation for expecting an effect we should conclude it's probably just an artifact of publication bias or common causation.

Of course given that people are so conviced radiation is evil that they falsely convince themselves it makes them sick I don't expect this kind of reasoned consideration to have much impact on the public at large. However, if you are that afraid of "radiation" you should find another website.

Well, yes in a certain very distorted sense of the word there is more evidence coming out that carrying a cell phone isn't very healthy, I mean as time passes we do see more studies claiming connections between negative health outcomes and cell phone use. However, we also see more studies disputing this link.

Could cell phones be somewhat unhealthy? Sure, but there are some careful studies suggesting the opposite and most importantly any theoretical basis for the supposed effect is at best pretty speculative.

First of all ask yourself if you were a cell phone company would it make sense to go out and suppress the science with some organized cover up? For starters given that lots of smart people who have read the research aren't convinced it's likely that your biases as a cell phone exec would virtually guarantee that you didn't believe the health claims. But in that case you would want to fund the most reputable scientists and perform the most respectable study possible rather than funding less influential rent-a-studies. Even if these execs have been convinced of the link by a unpublished stream of compelling evidence the lawsuit against the tobacco companies should have taught them that you shouldn't cover up the science and risk liability when you can just use advertising to associate your product with healthy living in the mind of the public despite the science.

I mean let's be serious, the idea that the cell phone companies are engaged in some intentional plan to cover up the evidence about cell phone harm just isn't plausible. But while it isn't as sexy we know that publication bias exists and can have a substantial effect. Scientists want to spend their time on papers that will bring recognition, grants and employment not ones that say "we didn't find any statistically significant correlation in the groups we examined." This means we are a lot more likely to hear about data sets showing a link than those that don't. After all 5% of studies should end up with an effect at a 95% significance.

Moreover, it's hugely difficult to run a randomized trial for this kind of claim meaning that any effect could be nothing more than an unrecognized prior cause. People who use cell phones are far more likely to use a wide range of other products and probably correlates with a ton of genetic and socio-economic factors. Even studies linking which ear people used for their phone to later cancer occurrence aren't definitive. It's certainly plausible that our dominant hemisphere is more active/different and thus runs a greater risk of cancer.

The truth is that these sort of weak statistical links between an item an ill health effects are frequently wrong and need to be examined carefully. If, as we see in the cell phone study, not only do the studies go both ways but the more careful positive studies show a weaker effect and we lack any firm theoretical foundation for expecting an effect we should conclude it's probably just an artifact of publication bias or common causation.

Of course given that people are so conviced radiation is evil that they falsely convince themselves it makes them sick I don't expect this kind of reasoned consideration to have much impact on the public at large. However, if you are that afraid of "radiation" you should find another website.

Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.

Also quoted lower down in the page:

(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures).

A statistic with FF at 45% doesn't really surprise me at all. Some countries in Europe have passed this number a while ago. Here's a quote from an article in April of this year (before FF3):

The three countries with the highest Firefox market share are Finland, Poland, and Slovenia, which all have between 43 and 46 percent. Notably, the study saw the average market share exceed 30 percent during weekends, likely because of people who are using Internet Explorer at work and Firefox at home, by choice.

It is unlikely for FF to have an overall controlling force in the market without major corporations and/or government entities switching to it and OEMs like Dell and HP offering their buyers browser choices out of the box.

And Symbian is not?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081203-nokias-oss-strategy-gets-boost-as-symbian-deal-completed.html

Just because your phone runs at a higher clock speed doesn't mean it's more powerful than a PS2. No phone, not even an N96 or an iPhone, is currently more powerful than a PS2, though no doubt they'll get there within a couple of years.

The PS2 is a weird system, I'd recommend reading this technical overview of the Emotion Engine. There's also a link in there to another Ars article comparing the PS2 to PC style platforms.

I think that article shows why Sony thought the Cell was a good idea for the PS3. The PS2 gets most of its power from two vector units so having a PPC core linked with seven directly programmable vector units (one of the two VUs in the EE was linked into the geometry unit) probably seemed like a natural progression.

... another RIA platform. Only this one doesn't have a userbase yet and I don't think it'll have one to speak of in the near future; it is Windows and Mac OS only

so it's got a potential user-base of approximately 98.8% of web clients?

Until we get a phone that doesn't use any code signing, nobody is going to be very interested in the product, because it's merely an iPhone competitor (and the iPhone has Apple's sexy marketing behind it, so you might as well just develop for that and make more money).

But to develop for the iPhone, you need to get a $99 development license, and then you still have to play by Apple's rules: no emulators, no competing with built-in apps, etc.

Developing for Android is free, and there are no limitations on what you're allowed to develop or distribute. You can write software that not only competes with built-in apps, but actually replaces them. And you can distribute them through Google's marketplace, through a competing marketplace, through your own web site, or anywhere else.

Code signing only means that you can't replace the OS with a version you've compiled yourself... but even that is being worked around.

754 lasted longer.

Also as Nevarre points out. The 939 was suppose to be THE AMD socket.

Shameless self promotion: This article at Ars Technica explains how peering and transit works. For some more info see my blog: Internet Thought.

Ars had an article about a technology that was made to help address this issue. Might be of interest to someone:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081103-comcastic-p4p-trial-shows-80-speed-boost-for-p2p-downloads.html

Bollocks.

I don't want them filtering my internet any more than I want them filtering my mail, my TV, or my radio. Unfortunately the FCC seems to have take upon itself to filter broadcast TV and radio. A power they were never granted by the people. They just took it; largely in response to a really whiny special interest group. An organization made up of a mere 1.3 million (~0.4% of the US population!) uptight fucks have almost single handedly managed to get all the real life stuff banned from TV. They're responsible for 99.9% of complaints (which is the only thing the FCC acts on) in 2003.

I don't want asshats like this sucking the life out of the internet like they have TV and radio.

You may like this article.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060521-6880.html

Doctorow says he is a law prof who writes like a comedian(Is that a good thing?)

No, it's a meaningless thing given that Doctorow has little to no education, and is an author who has never been of sufficient caliber to get the attention of a publisher (and no, I do not count a company that publishes Halo fanfiction "books" to be a publisher.)

He's also a hypocritical little shit; we never did see him press charges against the SFWA for filing illegal DMCA notices, now did we? Funny how he didn't get all up in their grill, but he's happy to incite riots among his BoingBoing readers when it doesn't involve him?

It's absolutely fascinating that both he and his wife have managed to attain positions in academia despite having no fucking education. Seriously- she's a WoW player/Quake gamer, and USC calls her a "fellow"? What the FUCK? What drugs did she put in their water?

What 'directx 10 on xp' hack, I'm imagine. Where's the link?

Like I said, the only "hacks" I've seen are for specific games, and don't actually allow you to run DX10 on XP. EX: Shadowrun / Halo 2, Crysis.

Ars Technica points out that Greenpeace's research isn't quite up-to-snuff, and it's also worth noting that Greenpeace admitted to targeting Apple for the publicity in the past.

Why was this posted, then?

I don't really think publishers are "The Bad Guys" either. When publishers read stories of un-DRM'ed titles like World of Goo having a 90% piracy rate, I imagine they feel justified.

Nope. We're only happy with zero mouse buttons now!

Will somebody please give this guy a link to the film bunch that is desperately trying to save the pre 1940 movies like Mae West and WC fields? I'm afraid my Google Fu is sucking the big wet titty ATM. I'm sure once someone else with better Google Fu posts a link you can read it yourself. They have a list on their website of films that we have already lost forever. Why?

Try to think like a large business for a sec,okay? You are the head of a large film business. You have vaults full of movies you think are "old crap" because they didn't make a profit when first released and don't have a gimmick to sell it with, like "It's a Wonderful Life" which you can repackage every holiday season. Now why on earth would you waste all that money to preserve things which you couldn't figure out how to make a profit on when it was new? The correct answer is you wouldn't. Because the shareholders only care about history as far as the quarterly earnings report and it will be very hard to justify such a capital expense when you don't know how to profitize it. So you let it set for the next CEO, who lets it set for the next guy,etc. Only problem is one day somebody opens the can and all you have is dust. Bye Bye movie.

And I know how the law works, thank you very much. it is called money. For nearly 180 years we had copyright law that worked. Then came the Sono Bono act and the DMCA. Have you looked at who donated money to those bills? Who lobbied the congress and senate and threw money around like it was going out of style? But you already know this. You already know that every public advocacy group was simply ignored and this crap was ramrodded through.

But lucky for me I don't have to debate this with you. You want to know why? because the children of the net don't play your little reindeer games,that's why. Last year they gave the little "we luv copyrights" papers and lecture at my nephew's school. When he told me this as I was walking up to him and his buddies I asked them "So what do you think of movies and record companies?" All those wonderfully little subversive children said variations on "greedy pigs!". They have seen it costs 40K to fill up their iPod and think it is BS so they just don't play the "imaginary property" game. So unless you plan to lock up the huge amounts of children and adults that don't play your game then you'll simply have to change. The horse and buggy business is dead. So are 78 records. Change with the times or enjoy your slow death. But those of us who don't want copyrights completely destroyed will be pushing for a return for the 25 year fair terms. But if you honestly think you can control the flow of progress by creating crazy laws,well good luck with that. And you keep saying "the law" like that makes it right. News flash, it don't. And if the majority of the public refuses to follow a law then it is time to change it. Don't you agree?

I want to know if this kills that stupid "wish list" patent that turned into a lawsuit vs the little guys because your grocery list could land you in court with these patent trolls.

and the article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080211-vista-capable-scheme-was-panned-at-microsoft.html

Mike Nash, currently a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an e-mail, "I PERSONALLY got burnt. ... Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? ... I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine." Jim Allchin, then the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, wrote in another e-mail, "We really botched this. ... You guys have to do a better job with our customers."

People are always coming out of the wood work to claim supercomputer performance with such and such a solution, go back and look at GRAPE (which is really cool.) http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061212-8408.html or a lot of other supercomputer clusters. When you want something flexible, you look for "balance" that means a good relationship between memory capacity, latency & bandwidth, as well as computer power. in terms of memory capacity, the number people talk about is: 1 byte/flop... that is 1 Tbyte of memory is about right to keep 1 TFLOP flexibly useful. this thing has 4 G of memory for 4 TF... in other words: 1 byte / 1000 flops. it's going to be hard to use in a general purpose way.

No, they won't.

WOE(s) be unto THEM!

What is scary as hell, though, is:

"Microsoft to aid in war on terror, builds software for DHS"

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081121-microsoft-to-aid-in-war-on-terror-builds-software-for-dhs.html

The issue of RIAA RICO has been discussed at least twice before here and here on Slashdot and Ars wrote an article last year explaining why a RICO suit was unlikely to succeed against the RIAA, scumbags though they may be.

AMD has consistently bested Intel in performance-per-watt comparisons. Their newest released processors (Shanghai) already offer better performance-per-watt than Intel's pre-i7 processors (see Ars' Shanghai review here). They are behind still, yes. But they are catching up.

As often, Ars Technica has had this for a while.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080726-new-dns-exploit-now-in-the-wild-and-having-a-blast.html

I quote:

"This would be less of an issue if the widely released patch from two weeks ago had been fully deployed"

And:

Moving to the more DNSSEC system would have solved this problem, and that idea was apparently floated, but it was dismissed on account of the tremendous overhead required by this protocol. The patch that currently exists is not a foolproof solution, but it minimizes the chances that the attack will succeed. "The exploit is now tens of thousands of times harder, but still possible," Kaminsky stated during his Black Hat webcast. "one in several hundred million to one in a couple billion."

Yawn.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050221-4636.html
This seems to be the same as the Lexmark vs SCC case a while back. Took a while, but SCC finally won.

For the lazy: Static Control Components made a chip that got around an authentication procedure between the cartage and the printer to prevent refills of the cartage. Lexmark got an injunction, SCC appealed, and finally won.

I submitted a story about this Monday, Constitutionality of P2P law "under attack" (rejected) after seeing it in an AP story in the Chicago Tribune. That story quoted NYCL, who it of course called Ray Beckerman. I wondered at the time why he hadn't submitted it himself.

But at any rate, for the corporate media spin on this, here are a few links:
Billion Dollar Charlie vs. the RIAA
Legal Jujitsu in a File-Sharing Copyright Case
Lawsuits Brought by Music Industry Are Unconstitutional, Lawyer Says
Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits (AP)
Law Professor Takes on RIAA
Prof: Penalty unfair, will help with $1M download lawsuit
RIAA defendant enlists Harvard Law prof, students
Harvard Professor: File-Sharing Lawsuits Unconstitutional

Next, they'll sue backbone network providers. Because the use of this technology for doing legal things (like work) is statistically negligible. Once they get some guy in some important-sounding office to make a wild guess at a statistic for the amount of bandwidth used for legal vs. illegal activities, and that gets passed to somebody else that is more important, and that gets passed on to some news reporter that doesn't care so much about the verifiability of facts... wait a minute, that would never happen!

a 2007 crack is irrevocable.

Getting the volume ID isn't a crack. If you'll note, that diagram in that article itself still requires input from the device keys to perform decryption. It's old news that was reported poorly.

this is why we have things like anydvd HD, etc, and why they pushed out BD+, which was ALSO cracked.

For further reference on the ease of ripping BLU-RAY for naive users, see this link

Game over, and once again, the MPAA loses.

I've been doing some digging into how AnyDVD HD actually works, and it apparently requires an Internet connection to download keys from an AnyDVD service. Hardly a crack in any meaningful terms, and I'm not exactly itching to sign up.

a 2007 crack is irrevocable.

this is why we have things like anydvd HD, etc, and why they pushed out BD+, which was ALSO cracked.

For further reference on the ease of ripping BLU-RAY for naive users, see this link

Game over, and once again, the MPAA loses.

I told him that he should consider downgrading to XP or moving to a Mac

FYI: Apple is starting to implement HDCP/DPCP DRM as well.

Yes... all information you could easily google on your own but that you don't feel like doing MUST be a troll... http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/11/17/apple-brings-hdcp-to-a-new-aluminum-macbook-near-you

Your logic board is broken.

Konqueror is still using their own KHTML, but they're working on switching over to Apple's fork, eventually.

Very interesting, I hadn't heard of that before. The linked article is quite old, do you have any more recent information about the switch? Is it still on?

CJ

I know nothing; I found that with Google.

Finding TFA severely lacking, might I recommend a more informative article from, Ars Technica.

Konqueror is still using their own KHTML, but they're working on switching over to Apple's fork, eventually.

Very interesting, I hadn't heard of that before. The linked article is quite old, do you have any more recent information about the switch? Is it still on?

CJ

As a HAM, I have met a few who have nifty gear able to tune into cell phones and their 'pings' or tower replies (from post-911 US cellphones) and a few of them have told me that there seems to be more than just pinging or tickling the towers going on. More than is needed to keep up the TX/RX channels open or for simply switching towers based on cell tower capacity and range to the handset.
Others hinted that the removal of the battery does not fully prevent (post-911 US cellphones) from receiving radio frequency energy and replying uniquely (just like RFID tags do but cell phones have Much better antennas).
Links that touch some on this topic:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=8068
http://jya.com/cell-track.htm
http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/37748res20081112.html
http://allgpstracking.net/gpstracking/index.php/gpstracking/2006/03/12/how_gps_works_gps_tracking
http://ezinearticles.com/?Cell-Phone-Location-Tracking-Information&id=782355
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21442821-Cell-phone-location-tracking-without-telcos-help
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081116-foia-docs-show-feds-can-lojack-mobiles-without-telco-help.html
http://www.danbrown.com/secrets/digital_fortress/cell_phones.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3945496.ece
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but because RFID tags cost only a few cents each, why would similar capability NOT be incorporated into the chips of modern cell phones. Tear down an RFID tag, it is just a very very small semiconductor chip paired to a set of antennas between layers of opaque plastic tape an a sticker backing.
(NOTE: In college, we had fun by carefully removing discovered RFID tags and 'repatriating' them onto different and unrelated merchandise at our local Wal-Mart Supercenter... good times..... not to be confused with the old tried and true bi-metallic strips that loss control departments use which set off the door antenna loops that we all walk through. But sticking one of those to your buddy's jacket made for a good laugh...)

It's a tricky situation for Yahoo... the way I see it - and I'm aware this might be horribly oversimplified - they have two ways to turn things around.

1) Improve their market share in search - not easily done, considering Google's spending power and constant innovation in this area. Microsoft have been haemorrhaging money trying to compete here, and it doesn't seem to be getting them very far - look at the lukewarm reception to their cashback scheme for evidence.

2) Start to better monetise their online tools and content (Pipes, Shopping, Answers etc.). If anything this is even trickier... even with pipes winning numerous plaudits in the industry and a huge user base on the likes of Answers, turning these into a major source of revenue is a tough problem.

I realise this is quite gloomy, which is a shame because I really want Yahoo to succeed, but let's be honest - it doesn't look too good at the moment does it?

harnessing P2P for infrastructure

You mean Redswoosh ? The bittorrent clone he sold to Akamai, shortly before launching a crusade against all P2P traffic ?

Yeah, quite the genius alright. I can't want to read his new book "My Cuban is bigger than yours"

Including harnessing P2P for infrastructure, while publicly championing the technique's place on the Internet despite network operator and copyright holder intererence. He's also spoken influentially for realistic revisions to copyright, contrary to some of his obvious interests as a major copyright holder, as an informed Internet business guru.

Um...What?

The fact that this occurred in June of '04 and he's being charged for it now implies that either it takes that long to build up evidence for a case or you don't hear about this until someone slips up.

Whatever happened happened in 2004, but he's being charged only in the last few weeks Bush can direct the SEC.

Funny how the other thing that happened recently was that Cuban just launched a website, BailoutSleuth looking into and organizing against the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

BTW, in America people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, especially when Bush has a political crusade at stake. Even if Cuban is guilty, it's pretty "coincidental" timing to start prosecuting him.

No, if that were the case, they would have gone after Cuban after he funded Redacted, or any of the other stupid stuff Cuban is guilty of.

In an open letter to Internet service providers published earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban calls for telecoms to put an end to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. Cuban expresses concerns that P2P "freeloaders" are clogging the tubes with commercial content. His letter doesn't focus on piracy, however, and instead primarily attacks companies that use P2P for legitimate commercial applications.

and here's your flame:

1. sci-fi / fantasy is an object of much overwrought disapproval from many religious groups. While I had thought the issue to be mostly smoldering rather than active, the Christian Children's Fund declined a large donation from the estate of the late Gary Gygax one of the inventors of the Dungeons and Dragons game. http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/11/04/charity-declines-money-from-group-associated-with-gygax

2. what pleasure do you get from trolling around /. looking for any possible angle to malign groups you are not a member of? Because you seem in danger of embodying the sort of intolerance most atheists accuse religions of.

3. just because you can make a circular argument does not make you some sort of mental giant. such things are only aesthetically pleasing when they express some truth or fact concisely. yours does not.

-1: Wrong

I would not expect the GPL to be compatible with the security restrictions around the F-22's avionics firmware though.

Why not? The GPL only applies to software distribution. Unless the F-22 is being sold, the GPL doesn't apply. And if the F-22 is being sold, then the customer probably wants access to that software anyway, to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure that they can fix any bugs they find. The US military has even gone so far as cracking software to avoid exactly this kind of problem.

shortcoming yes, important web browser? Dude Im a mac users, a claimed Apple zealot, and all that and even I dont see the importance in Safari.

There are four major HTML rendering engines right now, two of which are commercial (Microsoft's Trident and Opera's Presto) and two of which are open-source (Mozilla's Gecko and Apple's WebKit). Of these, only WebKit is really growing right now - more and more browsers are being built on it. Safari is the reference implementation for a WebKit-based browser. That's why Safari is important.

In addition to Safari (and the mobile version of Safari used on the iPhone and iPod touch), WebKit is also used by Adobe AIR, Google Chrome, and Nokia's S60 browser. Also, Konqueror is still using their own KHTML, but they're working on switching over to Apple's fork, eventually.